For years, postal services around the world have been sorting flat articles using automation equipment. Mail piece weights have typically been determined or validated by scale systems measuring force. A flat article is transported with roller pinch belt technology to an area in the sorting machine equipped with a scale. The flat article leaves the pinch belt control and is transported on the narrow axis of the mail piece onto a bottom conveyer belt. The bottom conveyor belt is integrated with a force compensator which is inductively coupled to a sensor or to a strain gauge type scale. The reaction times of these two technologies have an 15 inherent disadvantage when trying to weigh mail pieces at the speed of today's mail sorting equipment. The scale cannot settle in time to make an accurate measurement before the next mail piece arrives at the scale. Methods to overcome these disadvantages are explained in Kinnemann U.S. Pat. No. 6,107,579, Aug. 22, 2000, and Gerstenberg, et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,861,592, Mar. 1, 2005, the contents of which are incorporated by reference herein. Splitting the mail path allows larger gaps, giving the scale a longer time to settle.
Massucci U.S. Pat. No. 7,162,459 describes another method to overcome the disadvantage of using a physical apparatus to weigh items at high speed by estimating the weight of the flat article. The Massucci measuring system includes a transport, a first plurality of detectors for measuring the dimensions of the mail piece and a second plurality of detectors for measuring values of other characteristics of the mail piece which are indicative of the presence of non-paper materials in the mail piece as the mail piece is transported. The microprocessor is responsive to the second detectors to determine if non-paper materials are included in the mail piece and, if not, determines the volume from the dimensional measurements and estimates the weight as the product of the volume and a density for paper output an appropriate postage amount to the meter and the mail piece to the printer. It is a purpose of this invention to overcome the inherent disadvantages of Massucci, Kinnemann and Gerstenberg.
It is a purpose of this invention to overcome the inherent disadvantages of Massucci, which makes the assumption that flat articles are made of paper, when in fact today's mail is made up of a variety of substrates. Even Massucci says it would be desirable to add an amount of 10% to the weight estimate to allow for errors in the measurement. It is the intent of this invention to resolve the weight of flat articles by comparing the compiled sensors data of a mail piece to historical classifiers built for the purposes of determining the weight of an object.